[next] [prev] [prev-tail] [tail] [up]

1 Introduction

This documentation describes the main features of the TeX Live 7 CD-ROM—a TeX/LaTeX distribution for Unix, Linux, MacOSX, and Windows32 systems that includes TeX, LaTeX2e, METAFONT, MetaPost, Makeindex, and BIBTeX; and a wide-ranging set of macros, fonts and documentation conforming to the TeX Directory Standard (TDS)—which can be used with nearly every TeX setup.

This TeX package uses the Web2c version 7.3.7 implementation of the programs, which tries to make TeXing as easy as possible, and takes full advantage of the efficient and highly customizable Kpathsea library from Karl Berry and Olaf Weber. It can be run either directly from the CD-ROM or installed on a hard disk.

Most of the runnable systems on the CD-ROM include a large set of drivers and support programs for TeX, including dvips (PostScript driver), dvipdfm (dvi to PDF), xdvi (X Windows previewer), dvilj (HP LaserJet driver), lacheck (LaTeX syntax checker), tex4ht (TeX to HTML converter), dviconcat and dviselect, dv2dt and dt2dv (dvi to ASCII and vice versa), and Angus Duggan’s PostScript utilities.

1.1 Extensions to TeX

The TeX Live runnable systems contain three extended versions of standard TeX:

  1. e-TeX, which adds a small but powerful set of new primitives, and the TeX--XE T extensions for left to right typesetting; in default mode, e-TeX is 100% compatible with ordinary TeX. See texmf/doc/etex/base/etex_man.pdf on the CD-ROM for details.
  2. pdfTeX, which can optionally write Acrobat PDF format instead of DVI. You will find the user manual in texmf/doc/pdftex/pdftex-l.pdf. The file texmf/doc/pdftex/samplepdf/ samplepdf.tex shows how it is used. The LaTeX hyperref package has an option ‘pdftex’, which turns on all the program features.
  3. Omega (Omega), which works internally with 16-bit characters, using Unicode; this allows it to directly work with almost all the world’s scripts simultaneously. It also supports dynamically loaded ‘Omega Translation Processes’ (OTPs), which allow the user to define complex transformations to be performed on arbitrary streams of input. See texmf/doc/omega/base/doc-1.8.tex for some (not necessarily up to date) documentation.

e-TeX (version 2.1) is stable, although subsequent releases will add new functionality. pdfTeX (version 1.00b) is also stable, but is still being improved. Omega (version 1.23) is under development; the version on this CD-ROM is that current as of May 2002.

[next] [prev] [prev-tail] [front] [up]